I Play for the Audience

When it comes to Indian Cricket Team, I must say they are totally committed towards customer satisfaction, they want to make every match really interesting for the audience. Yesterday in the close encounter with South Africa, Appam and party were again in top form, they made sure that the match goes to the last ball.. I have captured some of the excepts from the post match interview session with Appam

Reporter: How do you rate your performance yesterday?

Appam: My performance was awesome, I was good in both fielding and bowling, never got the chance to bat, could have been a complete day for me.

Reporter: You were taken for runs all round the field Appam , your fielding was awful, and you are still saying that you were good .. your batting could have ended a lucky escape for India ..

Appam: You are talking rubbish, In the field we play as global players, there were few of the players in the opposition of my IPL team,I cant mess around with my IPL career..

Reporter: So what was your approach in the Game

Appam: I want each spectator on the field to be involved, be its Indian or South African and it should be the prime work of all the players. We are entertainers and end of the day the thrill of the match should be kept alive. I wanted to throw the balls to covers but my accuracy was not upto the mark and the ball fell few feet away from Dhoni .

Reporter: What kind of result were you aiming for?

Appam : Tie would have been the best result and could have kept the interest of all the spectators in the remaining matches. Only my inaccurate throw needs to be blamed for the same.

Thanks Appam for the brilliant performance, just because of the players like you the interest in 50 over match is still alive. Appam has definitely taken the game to a different level.

Taste of Water ...

When we travel from one place to another the usual belief is that the taste of the water changes? But is it just a myth or there is some real truth behind this belief? This is one of the doubts I always had, When I came to Jammu, I water didn’t tasted good and I have been drinking Aqua Fina water only from few days ,Infact I believe I have started to like the taste of Aqua Fina water from months of usage.

So in order to clarify my doubt I started to search it on internet and found an answer which was quite a surprise to me. The humans are actually not capable of tasting water, few of the animals like Dogs and Pigs are. Our tongue cannot taste pure water and the taste we find in drinking water is purely due to the extra minerals or impurities which are the part of it.

So why do we like water of particular brand or say particular city? May be because each one has different kinds of mineral or chemical impurities and due to daily consumption of a particular kind of water (impurities), one tends to like that kind of water.

My Introduction to stock markets …

When I first heard about stock markets way back in 90’s, it was always from the kind of money my relatives or my neighbors are making in the business, they all became my role models. They used to be surrounded by people asking for tips to invest or rather trade in the market.I used to think if I have money, I will invest in a 5 Rs stock , it will jump to 20 than again I’ll invest in another 5 Rs Stock and it will again jump to 20 in few days , the money will become 16 times .. Oh is it so easy, I said to myself, I just need to have 1000 Rs and I will become millionaire one day..this was how I was introduced to the stock market and I was barely 8 year old.

My father used to invest only in IPOs (Initial Public Offering, where one invest in the companies going for listing). I used to wonder why he is so conservative with investment, why not invest in the rapidly moving stocks in the exchange, the money is so huge there, you need to just bet on one and make merry for yourself.

I used to check out daily stock prices of father’s holdings, finding out whether we are making money or losing? In a classic bull market everything used to move so fast, wow we are making money even in IPOs. Everyone just used to talk about share and its returns those days. I used to feel that everyone is so intelligent, I should also know about it. Then there was an Uncle living close to our home and used to always talk big about the latest killing he has made in the market. I used to think, he must be so rich.

The euphoria didn’t lasted long, the whole market crashed, few of the people were badly hit, few sold of their houses, Harshad Mehta became the talk of the town. The Uncle living next door was never seen again in the neighborhood, people say he fled with his family due to the fear of creditors..

Then I thanked my father for being conservative, It’s not so easy after all.. but still that feeling was there inside me ,may be these people were not wise enough I can still make money in this market .. They should have short sold the stocks and they could all had been so rich.. I can do it one day, I used to say to myself..

To be continued..

Insurance against Alien Kidnapping ..

What are the chances of you being kidnapped by Aliens ? You can call it a Hollywood effect, some kind of phobia, good marketing game by Insurance company but there had been more than 40,000 buyers of such insurance policy which will protect them from it .

Goodfellows Insurance offers such a policy which provides massive coverage of $1.7 millions for just 400$ premium . Needless to say that insurance companies makes money out of diseased state of our minds.

The protection against terrorist is one more popular policy nowadays chances of which is again minimum but people are happy to pay a high premium for it !

Top Websites in India

I was just surfing through internet and found alexa.com, it is one of the most popular website for finding out traffic of a site on Internet. It is being used as one of the industry wide benchmark for checking the popularity of the site . Infact one can very easily create his account on Alexa and check out the traffic ranking of it.

I was just curious to know that how many google websites are there in top 20 of India . The list goes as such .. ( Courtesy Alexa)

1. google.co.in
   

   No surprises . Google , nice start (1/1)
   

2. google.com

   Google wins it again 2/2
   

3. yahoo.com

   Legacy of yahoo , which started the email revolution in India , quite deserving but more tech savvy people have moved on ...
   
   

4. facebook.com

   This was a surprise (pleasant one ), I thought orkut is more popular in India .. online games like Farmville and mafia wars has improved its visibility ..
   

5. blogger.com

   Another google website and host for our blogs .. 3/5

6. youtube.com

   hmm , right there on the top , number one streaming videos website, even when webspeed is not great here . The content is just too good . (4/6) for google

7. orkut.co.in

   Orkut, number 1 website of Brasil but at lucky 7 position in India , offlate it has got real tough competition from Facebook . ( 5/7 )

8. rediff.com

   surprise surprise , an Indian website in Indian top 20 ,

9. wikipedia.org

   I am a big fan of Wiki , they are doing a great social service .. Very deserving .

10. orkut.com

    Orkut.in and Orkut.com combined might overtake facebook , what do you think .. (6/10) . wow google is killing the competition here

11. twitter.com

    Social Networking redefined , I see great future for this website and should enter top 10 very soon .

12. indiatimes.com

    Another desi website , good portal

13. linkedin.com

    Recession might have improved the popularity of this website in India . Another social networking website just behind facebook , orkut and twitter .

14. live.com

    Another surprise , Personally I found this website really good but never seen anyone surfing it though .

15. wordpress.com

    Blogging is becoming a rage in Indians , second blogging webpage in top 20.

16. cricinfo.com

    It has to be there , by far the best Cricket webpage , Automated page refresh after every 20 second might again be making it easier for it.

17. ie100.net

    never heard of it ..

18. msn.com

    Still popular , specially people love hotmail and the new page on Indian news is very popular amongst youth.

19. microsoft.com

    Windows default homepages might be helping it to enter top 20 otherwise I dont see any daily need for anyone to visit this portal.

20. in.com

    Indian website which has made waves in last year , another surprise for me .

Sites to look out for :

I believe two the website which can enter the top 20 in next 4-5 years : -

1. moneycontrol.com with excellent research on Equity markets .

2. valueresearchonline.com : - One of the best websites I have ever seen on Mutual Funds

Nursery Admissions in Delhi..

In the last blog I was comparing the ease of admissions in good Engineering colleges of India and USA, now take a look at even tougher admissions, admissions in Nursery for Delhi kids.

Their is again a huge demand supply mismatch of good schools in Delhi inspite of good efforts by the government . Their are more number of children running for fewer seats and the competition is breathtaking. The admissions committee of nursery schools devise a 100 point system for admissions and the point allocation varies from one school to another.

So the first step for parents is to fill the forms for various schools and they will be awarded points on various parameters which often looks absurd to me. The common criteria are : -

1. Alumni : If any of the parents have been alumnus of the school they will get 5 to 10 points . Now is it the mistake of the kid if his parents are uneducated or were not brought up in Delhi.

2. Neighborhood :- It is again a most important criteria and nearly 20-30 marks are allotted to it. This criteria makes lot of sense as without it the ambitious parents will try and put their kids in far located or may be best schools putting pressure on both the child and the traffic of the city.

3. Girl Child : If the candidate is girl, she will be awarded 5 to 10 points which varies from school to school. Now its good to encourage girl child education but is it the fault of the young boy or his parents if he is a boy ?

4. Sibling : Delhi school wants sibling to study in same school and provides extra points for it which makes it tougher for first kid or parents who wants just 1 kid.

5. Single Parents : Single parents are given 5 to 10 extra points.

6. Your views on Education System : This is a qualitative analysis of your thought process based on which the parents are awarded points..

One of the welcome moves has been the removal of extra points for the parents education. It has not been taken very well by the elite class of Delhi but I fully support it and even believe that uneducated parents can even be given few extra points to educate their wards.

So after the shortlisting of children based on points its the interview round, previously there used to be interview of the candidate (Kids! ) but now it has been abolished by the government ,we still have interview of the parents . There are FAQ of the same which lot of parents are reading and preparing for it these days .. the day is not far when we have classroom coaching for the same..

T are parents who gets zero points out of the this point system, does it means that there children are not worthy of good education ?

College Seats.. Demand and Supply ..

Just got hold of the data of selection rate (Engineering Courses ) in Top US Universities , courtesy app2us.com

1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 23.5%

2 Stanford University 28.0%

3 University of California Berkeley 20.4%

4 Georgia Institute of Technology 36.8%

5 University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign 19.2%

6 California Institute of Technology 13.1%

7 Carnegie Mellon University 21.8%

8 University of Southern California Los Angeles 46.6%

9 Cornell University 19.8%

9 University of Michigan–Ann Arbor 36.4%


If you compare it with Indian universities, getting admission is far tougher. To get admission in IITs one has to be in top 2% even after massive increase in intake of IITs. Needless to that there is supply crunch in this sector.

Indian Entrepreneurs tried to tap the opportunity by opening lots of new colleges and universities but the quality and infrastructure, education, professors is still lagging behind in most the new colleges. I believe next 7-10 years will see massive capacity creation of institutes with good education and infrastructure . It might come from Indian Business houses or foreign universities setting up their colleges in India to reduce the large gap in demand and supply of good educational institutes.

The issue of supply of good professor is one factor which might trouble the growth of the industry and it might lead to massive increments in the salaries of Professors.

Google Home Page

Google just keep surprising me with its products and there features. Google homepage is the new addition to my favorite internet page. When I first looked at it , it just made me say " Oh, how could i miss it .. "

Normally homepage are not customized as per the user requirements and the website promote themselves by asking you to make there website as your homepage. In this new era of internet frenzy companies decided to provide more flexibility to the internet user by providing a platform where one can himself decide which website he want to follow on a regular basis. So now instead of wasting time in separately logging in to the different websites one can check out every thing at one go by logging into Google homepage . For example you can add Your Email account , social networking Website, Youtube , Blogs you follow, News Website, Weather Forecasting of your area etc on it and the moment you login to your Google ig account it will show you updates from all the websites. Its like a dashboard for you customized as per your requirements.

There are no advertisement on the homepage and you can even compose mails and chat with your friends through your gmail account connected through homepage.